Author: redscraper

Tentacle Tuesday: le mardi des tentacules, parbleu!

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In my ceaseless quest for tentacles, once in a while, I return to a previous theme – in this case, the Franco-Belgian tradition of comics. To start at the beginning, visit Tentacle Tuesday, Franco-Belgian edition parts 1 and 2, and Tentacle Tuesday: Tentacules à la mode.

We start some 70-some years ago, with an issue of Bob et Bobette, a Belgian feature created by Willy Vandersteen in 1945. Well, to be more precise, the latter created Suske en Wiske — when the strip became popular in its native De Standaard (a Flemish daily newspaper), it was picked up by Tintin magazine, after Vandersteen agreed to modify it somewhat according to Hergé (who was the magazine’s artistic director) and his Ligne claire guidelines. The main characters were renamed – far from the last time that happened: in Britain, they were known as Spike and Suzy, and as Willy and Wanda in the United States.

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Bob et Bobette no. 55: La cité des pieuvres (1947). Scripted by Jean-André Richard and illustrated by Robert Dansler, who was often known as Bob Dan. That lovely sepia paper… I can just smell it.

I’ve never read a whole album of The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec, though I like its premise (an intrepid, independent héroïne? yes, please) and Jacques Tardi‘s art (depending; sometimes I love it, sometimes I’m indifferent, but it’s certainly good enough for purposes of following a story). Chalk it down to something I never got around to, I guess. Irritatingly, in 2010 we have been *ahem* ‘blessed’ with a movie based on this comic, directed by the ever sharp-witted Luc Besson (who royally fucked up a movie adaptation of Valérian et Laureline in 2017, so he seems to be making this into a specialty).

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Le Noyé à deux têtes is the sixth volume of Les Aventures extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec, a series by Jacques Tardi. In 1984, it was serialised in À suivre, a Franco-Belgian magazine, and collected as an album a year later (both by Casterman).
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A peek at the tentacles within.

I mentioned the comics magazine Le journal Tintin earlier – here’s a cover from its competitor, Spirou (Le journal de Spirou), published by Éditions Dupuis since 1938. The respective publishers (Raymond Leblanc for Tintin, and Charles Dupuis for Spirou) of these magazines had a gentleman’s agreement: an artist’s work could only be published in one or the other, never both. Incidentally, there was an interesting exception in the case of André Franquin, who moved his wares from Spirou to Tintin after a quarrel with its editor – and, contractually obligated to work for Tintin for five years, simultaneously continued to provide Spirou with stories.

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Spirou no. 1771 (march 23rd, 1972), art by Puig. Brice Bolt, a feature launched in 1970, was soon abandoned after but two episodes (although to be fair, they were lengthy – the strip lasted until 1972)… from the sound of it, for being a little too modern for its time. After the publication of the first chapters, letters came in complaining that the story was too scary, the animals too monstrous, the illustration style too realistic. The “monstrous animals” included an army of giant crabs, a behemoth squid (just up our street!), colossal vampire bats, and ginormous Komodo dragons.

Valentin le vagabond was created by René Goscinny et Jean Tabary in 1962 for publication in Pilote. After 1963, Tabary carried on alone, scripting and illustrating all by his lonesome, Goscinny having his hands full with other projects. Valentin le vagabond et les hippies is the final story of this series, originally serialised in issues 709 to 719 in 1973.

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Valentin le vagabond: Valentin et les hippies (Dargaud, 1974). Story and art by Jean Tabary.
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An excerpt from Pilote no. 719 (1973). The tree is a hippie tree, as it was treated with LSD… now it’s got tentacles. Naturally.

The French are surely not immune from scatological humour. The Kaca fairy (I’ll give you three guesses for what “kaca” means in French) is a rather inept witch. She accidentally conjures up an octopus who’s a little too intent on being liked, and the rest of the comic deals with the attempts to whisk him away again.

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« Hurry up and make this monstrosity disappear! » « Yes, yes, I’m looking, but nothing works! » Panels from La fée Kaca (Humanoïdes Associés, 2007) by Florence Cestac.
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The octopus tries to convince everybody that they should allow him to stick (ha, ha) around – « for instance, I stick myself to the wall and leave you with all the room you need! ».

~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: Won’t Someone Think of the Children!?

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« Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself. » ― George Bernard Shaw

Indoctrinating children has to start early – if you want to make sure the aforementioned little ones will share your obsessions and spend their lives in a futile quest for the same peccadilloes you wasted your youth on, it’s best if you start proselytizing even before they can read. To that effect, quite a few authors of children’s comic books made sure to focus on cephalopods. I am happy to provide you with this abridged list of where to start when you need to convince some tot in your care that 1. octopuses are cool and 2. that they are entirely too intelligent and fascinating to ever be eaten.

Pages from Tomi Ungerer‘s Emile: The Helpful Octopus (first published in 1960):

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Pages from Octopus Escapes! (2018), written by Nathaniel Lachemeyer and illustrated by Frank W. Dormer:

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A page from Also an Octopus (2016), written by Maggie Tokuda-Hall and illustrated by Benji Davies:

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Page from Touchy the Octopus Touches Everything (2019), written by Amy Dyckman and illustrated by Alex Griffiths:

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Before someone complains that this post doesn’t include any “real” comics (what kind of pedant are you, bubba?):

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Dexter’s Laboratory no. 16 (December 2000), pencilled by Genndy Tartakovsky and inked by Bill Wray.
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Splash page from Dee-Dee’s Pony Tale, scripted by John Rozum, pencilled by John Delaney and inked by Jeff Albrecht. Did children really need to see a unicorn pony transformed into a three-headed Slavic dragon with tentacles? Well, yeah.
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Cartoon Cartoons no. 23 (December 2003), cover by Bill Wray.
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Page from Sunken Leisure, scripted by Robbie Busch, pencilled by Stephen DeStefano and inked by Bill Wray.

Finally, as a treat for the adults in the audience, I’ll end on an uplifting note (quite necessary after all that carnage by Dexter et al.): a cartoon by Jüsp (who ist tot, which is to say is dead – he died in 2002), published in Die Woche, an German illustrated weekly newspaper published from 1898 to 1944.

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~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: A Child’s Garden of Carnivorous Plants

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« Drosera’s snap tentacles — which can sense moving prey — catapult insects directly onto the glue tentacles at the plant’s center, where the prey is digested. What’s more, the catapult system is very effective—the insect almost never escapes. » (source)

Which child hasn’t passed through a temporary fascination with Venus flytraps in particular, and carnivorous plants in general? From there it only takes a tiny shift of the imagination to arrive at man-eating plants, which grab their victims with murderous tentacle-like tendrils, crawling vines and grabby creepers. Today we delve into one of my favourite sub-categories of tentacle obsession: plant tentacles.

This spine-chilling greenery often deploys its lethal vines in some remote corner of the Earth (well, in comics, at any rate). This, I firmly believe, is far scarier than the idea of other planets harbouring these carnivorous forms of life. After all, our chances of landing on Mars or somesuch are slim, and we’re a lot more (though not very) likely to wind up in some mysterious jungle.

But first, we deal with that old trope about a power-mad scientist breeding some man-devouring monstrosity in a pot, garden or greenhouse.

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Shadow Comics v. 2 no. 8 (November 1942, Street & Smith), cover by Vernon Greene.
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Page from Horror House, the cover story, scripted by Walter Gibson and illustrated by Jack Binder.
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The Botanist of Death, scripted by Joe Blair and illustrated by Lin Streeter, was published in Blue Ribbon Comics no. 19 (December 1941, Archie)
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 Gespenster Geschichten no. 550. One would think that a vampire getting restrained by a carnivorous plant is actually a *good* thing, but the lady seems unimpressed. Maybe she wanted to get bitten?

When I was a wee girl, my dad would give me piles of adventure books to read. Quite a few of them involved some intrepid explorers discovering (or literally falling into) a jungle (often hidden in some volcanic crater) in which prehistoric creatures had somehow survived (among the novels I remember reading were Sannikov Land and Plutonia by Vladimir Obruchev, The Lost World by Conan Doyle, Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc.) Cue dinosaurs and woolly mammoths! As I loved dinosaurs, I didn’t mind this recurring theme, which by now seems a little, shall we say, hackneyed.

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Turok, Son of Stone no. 26 (Dec. 1961-Feb. 1962, Dell), cover by George Wilson.

The cover story, The Deadly Jungle, is scripted by Paul S. Newman, penciled by Giovanni Ticci and inked by Alberto Giolitti.

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Very much on topic is this installment of Land Unknown (a comic adaption of the 1957 science fiction movie), scripted by Robert Ryder and illustrated by Alex Toth, published in Four Color no. 845 (August 1957, Dell).

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I shall doubtlessly return to this topic again. In the meantime, visit Plants sometimes have tentacles too and The Hungry Greenery.

By the way, the Drosera plant (more precisely, a genus that includes about 152 species) – called Sundew in common parlance – is not only lethal, but beautiful, too.

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A real-life plant tentacle in action – goodbye, little insect.

~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday Masters: Tony Millionaire

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Once upon a time, in a kingdom beyond the seven seas, a little boy lived under the name of Scott Richardson in a seaside town (let’s call it Gloucester and pretend it’s in Massachusetts). His whole family were artists, and he would watch his grandparents paint the sea, the ships that sailed it and the people who commanded the ships. It must have come as no surprise at all when the boy, too, started to draw. Eventually, he grew up, moved around a lot, almost started a major war and somewhere along the way, acquired the nom de plume of Tony Millionaire (which, according to him, « comes from Old French. It means a person who owns a thousand slaves. Serfs, not slaves. »

How’s that for a little fairytale? You will forgive me for the jejune introduction, but something about Millionaire’s art is magic. It is easy to underestimate how good an artist he is because his art is so cartoony, and his characters so outlandish: his award-winning, syndicated strip Maakies, for instance, concerns itself with a perpetually blotto stuffed crow (Drinky Crow) and his best pal, a sock monkey (Uncle Gabby). Both were TM’s childhood toys. All children make up stories about their playthings. What’s magic isn’t that he was able to create a world for his toys to inhabit, it’s that he was able to pull us, the audience, in with him.

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His art is also stunning on a purely technical level: the impeccable geometry of his Victorian houses, the zest of his epic battle scenes (often between a whale and a kraken, it should be noted), the lushness of the gardens inhabited by fairies, gossiping insects having tea, and mice with puritanical sensibilities.

A couple of other things about Tony Millionaire: he’s really funny (or “drunkenly charming”, if you prefer; read his interview with John F. Kelly from 1999), and he clearly loves drawing tentacles, gleefully sticking them hither and tither. He’s clearly long overdue for an inauguration into the elite hall of Tentacle Tuesday Masters. I’m not here to provide you with hard facts about when and how, either about the newspaper strip Maakies or about the comic series Sock Monkey. You can get that from elsewhere. But I do believe that this is the only website where you can get your tentacle fix *and* your TM fix all at once (courtesy of co-admin RG who did all the scanning work!)

Anyway, enough of this chit-chat, and let the tentacles abound!

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« Maakies is me spilling my guts… Writing and drawing about all the things that make me want to jump in the river, laughing at the horror of being alive. »

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As fun as Maakies are, I find that one gets weary of them quickly – they’re like chips that burst with flavour to the point of causing desensitization. I believe that Sock Monkey is where Millionaire really gets to shine; I fondly remember being bowled over by Sock Monkey: the Inches Incident, in which TM really put his nautical sensibilities to use. The other books from this series only reinforced this impression – the art was so much lusher, and the moral complexity of these stories made each tale bittersweet. The artiste himself summarized it well, stating that « Sock Monkey is me trying to rise above all that bullshit, to be more poetic, looking at the bright side, remembering the things that used to delight me as a child. At the same time, the main theme to all the Sock Monkey books is the crashing of innocent fantasy into bone-crushing reality. »

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Fantagraphics published a full collection of Sock Monkey strips, but you can also read three of them right here online. I would of course strongly suggest supporting the publishing house and the author by purchasing the book, but what kind of high moral ground can it be if one is not offered a choice?

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~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: We’re Off to the Moon!

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I think the most disappointing scientific discovery of recent years is that there appears to be no octopuses on the moon. Not one teensy-weensy tentacle was spotted by the lunar rovers (that we dispatched to the Moon for that very purpose, of course). But comics had led us to expect otherwise!
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 Mystery in Space no. 51 (May 1959), cover by Gil Kane.
The inside offers us even more tentacles:
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Battle of the Moon Monsters! was scripted by Gardner Fox, pencilled by Carmine Infantino and inked by Joe Giella.
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In the end, our protagonists realize that the tentacled monster is actually a spaceship, and one manned by humans, at that… after which both parties have a good laugh about having almost annihilated one another. A peculiar sense of humour, those astronauts.
A bit of comic relief…
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Panels from the one-pager Outer Space with art by Bob White, printed in Archie’s Madhouse no. 21 (September 1962)
And back to our scheduled program of lethal, tentacle-sprouting monsters that attack the moment anyone sets foot on the moon.
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« Traveling at an incredible speed, the rocket reaches the moon in twenty three hours and lands in the gigantic crater… » And what is waiting for our hero, freshly stepped from his rocket? Funny you should ask… Page from Rocket to the Moon (1951 one-shot, Avon) scripted by Walter Gibson and illustrated by Joe Orlando.
Here’s a good instance of the good folks at Marvel getting quite confused. The First Men in the Moon, published in 1901, was written by H. G. Wells. From the Earth to the Moon was written in 1865 by Jules Verne. Which one is this supposed to be an adaptation of, then? I can confirm that the vaguely ant-like creatures with tentacles are H. G. Wells’ creation. His Selenites are described as following: « They are vaguely similar to quasi-humanoid ants, about five feet tall, with a light physical constitution enclosed in an exoskeleton from which slender jointed limbs and whip-like tentacles protrude. »
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Marvel Classics Comics no. 31 (1978), cover by Alan Weiss.
However, the first page of this comic informs us that…
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So I guess whoever laid out the cover screwed up. The insides, scripted by Don McGregor and drawn by Rudy Mesina, are considerably better drawn, and an unqualified tentacular treat.
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I think the artist just wanted to draw tentacles, and this post is clearly not the place where he is likely to be judged for that little peccadillo.

Did this adaptation succeed in being faithful to and respectful of Wells’ influential novel? Well, not really, although an honest attempt was made. But I found that it focused far too much on the fight scenes, and left out quite a few complex nuances as well as skewing the philosophical underpinnings of The First Men in the Moon. That being said, if you like tentacles, I heartily recommend reading this issue. I cringe at the very idea of recommending something from the Marvel Classics line, but honestly must prevail. Really, it’s good fun. Take a look —

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Did the artist go into tentacle overdrive? Oh boy, did he ever!
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Thanks for traveling with us today! If you want more tentacles in space, visit Tentacle Tuesday: Have Tentacles, Will Space Travel, or perhaps Tentacle Tuesday: Entangled in Tentacles with Adam Strange. As for me, I’m waving my tentacle (I do have one on a bookshelf) and bidding you adieu until next Tentacle Tuesday!
~ ds
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Tentacle Tuesday: More Golden Age Wonder Woman Wonders!

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I’m always happy to revisit Wonder Woman in her glorious young days of being depicted by H. G. Peter, whose expressive, dynamic art I just can’t get enough of. The stories are none too shabby, either! In my earlier post, Tentacle Tuesday: H.G. Peter and Wonder Woman lend a hand, I overlooked a few choice cuts. Well, having spent a few delightful hours going through WW stories originally published in Wonder Woman, Sensation Comics or Comic Cavalcade, it is my pleasure to remedy my previous oversight, and I can possibly even claim that these two posts are a pretty definitive list of Wonder Woman’s tentacular entanglements.

Do you have a few hours to waste – pardon – dedicate to research, too? Here you can read the entirety of DC’s Wonder Woman: Golden Age multiple-volume omnibus. Personally I think the graphic designers responsible overamped the contrast when they cleaned up the images, and much prefer reading these stories in their original colour… but nothing beats having all of this stuff on one website for convenience.

All stories are written by William Moulton Marston with art by Harry G. Peter.

Demon of the Depths, printed in Wonder Woman no. 7 (winter 1943):

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The Adventure of the Octopus Plant!, printed in Sensation Comics no.  41  (May 1945):

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This is not strictly tentacle-related, but I would also like to share a few choice panels that I’ve stumbled upon while looking for tentacles. Gorgeously weird, they remind us just how strange, inventive and subversive Wonder Woman was in her glory days of yore!

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Etta is my favourite character, and this is a great showcase for her sense of humour! Sensation Comics no. 5 (May 1942)
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This is apparently a standard Amazonian ceremony – the girls dress as deer, are hunted and captured, and then cooked and consumed. Wonder Woman no. 3 (February-March 1943)
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I had to use at least one scene of bondage, right? I was mostly amused by the quip about French girls. Wonder Woman no. 6 (Fall 1943).
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Sensation Comics no.  41  (May 1945)

And voilà! But don’t fret, we will see Wonder Woman in the tender embrace of an octopus again… this time in the 60s, Robert Kanigher and all.

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Wonder Woman versus the Saboteurs, printed in Sensation Comics no. 5 (May 1942)

~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: « There I was, just minding my own business… »

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« It is a mistake to fancy that horror is associated inextricably with darkness, silence, and solitude. » ― H.P. Lovecraft

I’ve actually had a friend tell me that he sees tentacles wherever he goes because of my Tentacle Tuesdays. Hey, I’m not making this up – tentacles *are* everywhere. Whether you’re in a well-lit room, with reassuring noises of the city filtering through the windows, or in a city centre, cushioned from harm by the comforting presence of a crowd… repairing a TV set, kissing a date, heading over to the pub for a well-deserved drink… some cephalopod horror is but a blink away. Fie, fie, foul apparition!

What better beginning to this post than… TERROR VISION!!! (“Aiiieeee!“, to quote the man.)

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A page from Terrorvision, with very nice art (and possibly plot) by Howard Nostrand, printed in Chamber of Chills Magazine no. 19 (September 1953, Harvey).

Things go from bad to worse for our repairman…

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Normally I wouldn’t post yet another page from the same story, but I like the art so much that I have to share.

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I’ve already mentioned German horror comics in the shape Spuk Geschichten (see Tentacle Tuesday: A Torrent of Teutonic Tentacles). Its mother publication, Gespenster Geschichten, also has its share of tentacles. For now, I will limit myself to this one cover:

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It’s a cruel thing to do to a man who was just thirsting for one piddling stein of cool beer. I hope they all got better acquainted and are clinking glasses together in the next scene… but I doubt it. Gespenster Geschichten no. 545.

One would be justified in thinking that roofs are generally quite octopus-proof, but nope, this one is either a talented climber or just unimaginably huge.

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Chamber of Chills no. 3 (March 1973), pencilled by Alan Weiss and inked by Frank Giacoia.
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A street may look peaceful and quiet, but that doesn’t mean a shag rug tentacle isn’t stealthily creeping towards your leg. Far Frontier no. 1 (1984), drawn by Lee Carlson.

As a bit of an aside, there’s a really fun account of one collector’s quest for John Jacobs stories written for Madison Comics over at Kirby Your Enthusiasm (link: Finding John Jacobs). Far Frontier no. 1 has a few of those, and apparently they’re quite perverse and brain-melting. An excerpt of the essay in question to whet your appetite:

« I first became aware of [John Jacobs] through a review by noted comics writer Jan Strnad in The Comics Journal #94 of Dr Peculiar #1. I read and re-read it dozens of times and marveled at the samples of his primitive pencilled art. My mind tried to absorb a comic that had heavy religious overtones plus a healthy dose of T&A (with a monster rape/cannibal fetish). The reviewer theorized that John Jacobs’ mind must be like a bowl of maggots. »

As an editorial aside, I am inclined to trust Strnad on this, both because I really like his writing and because Kirby Your Enthusiasm‘s summary of Jacobs’ plots confirms the maggots theory.

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Pucker up, darling, for your goodnight kiss. Kid Eternity no. 13 (June 1994), cover by Sean Phillips.

~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: Bits and Bobs of Gold Key

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« And pray that this beautiful stranger is pleasing to the taste of the demon DARGOMMA! »

We have already covered a lot of Gold Key territory… there’s Tentacle Tuesday Masters: George Wilson and his painted covers for Gold Key as well as Tentacle Tuesday: Gold Key’s Octopian Plenitude. But it is my credo to never leave an octopus behind (lest he creep up on you with evil intentions), so I’d like to add a few covers we haven’t seen yet.

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea no. 2 (July 1965). Cover by George Wilson.

Todd Franklin of Neato Coolville has actually transformed this cover into a groovy wallpaper (go to his website to download the high-res version).

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Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea no. 13 (August 1968). Cover by George Wilson.
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Brothers of the Spear no. 7 (December 1973), cover by George Wilson.

That previous cover has borderline tentacles, I agree, but the completist in me insisted on its inclusion. Also, it’s entertaining.

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The Tree That Walks is illustrated by Jesse Santos. The story tags as detailed by GCD are «chariots; draft elands; giant carnivorous plants; human skeletons; leopard; rock slides; saddle elands». I had to look up “elands” (it’s an antelope). How much more entertaining can one get?
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Tales of Sword and Sorcery Dagar the Invincible no. 11 (April 1975). Cover by the underappreciated Luis Dominguez.

A beautiful cover this may be, but the insides are distinctly underwhelming. The title story, It Lurks by Moonlight, is scripted by Don Glut and illustrated by Filipino artist Jesse Santos, who seemed like a likable artist with a wide-ranging career… but his art is not my cup of tea.

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Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery no. 93 (August 1979), cover by Luis Dominguez. The cover story is Dum-Dum’s Basement and we’ve covered it in Tentacle Tuesday: Domesticated Octopus Seeks Soulmate

The painting lost something in detail (a lot, actually) when it was made into a cover… this is more what it originally looked like:

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Crisp octopus!

~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: In Your Neighbourhood and Mine

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Today’s post may step a bit outside my usual purview, which is to say that the octopuses I am introducing do not come from the pages of comics per se. They’re used for mercantile purposes, to attract public to a concert, sell a book or deliver a message. But though they are octopuses in advertising, their artists still clearly have their hearts (and fingers) in the cartooning world.

Exhibit A is this cover for Centipede Press’ edition of Masters of Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber. This edition was limited to 500 numbered copies, so it will surprise no-one when I state that it’s quite sold out (See? Tentacles sell.) The cover is by Jim & Ruth Keegan, a wife-and-husband team, also the authors of the comic The Adventures of Two-Gun Bob.

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Next, we have two music-related scenes, both from the Spanish side of things. ¡Fíjate!

The Roctopus Tea Party Festival takes place in Toledo, Spain. (Due to language constraints, I’m not exactly sure how many editions of it there have been.) Each poster features an octopus, but this is my favourite of the lot.

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Whoever designed the festival’s logo knew how to harness the power of a lone octopus eye.

This Mardid “lunch box restaurant & tiki room” (now sadly defunct) held a series of “Galician lunches with DJ” splendidly named Día del Tentáculo. With a little Google Translate magic, I came up with this description: « Imagine a restaurant where you can eat hamburger with shiitake and jalapeños, drink the mythical Mai Tai cocktail or enjoy Tentacle Day with the best Galician octopus. And all while listening to good music in an environment inspired by the 50’s America. Sounds like an explosive mix, right? » The hamburger sounds good, but it’s really the Galician octopus that draws one in!

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As the Spanish artist Roberto Argüelles held a few exhibitions of his art at Lunch Box, I’m going to assume this is his artwork.

This one I spotted plastered over some other poster in my neighbourhood. It states something like « Ultimatum: provide wages for all internships at all levels, or we go on strike. »

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At first I assumed this was poster for a sci-fi convention in San Francisco, but it turned out to be the cover of a comics anthology published by Skodaman Press.

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Art by Chuck Whelon.

~ ds

Tentacle Tuesday: Monsters With Really Long Arms

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A favourite trope of tentacular obsession in comics is populating stories with monsters boasting exceptionally long arms (sometimes more than one pair) that they can wind around stuff with ease. In other words, monsters with tentacle forelimbs. You’d have to abstain from comics altogether to never encounter that of which I speak (or stick to slice-of-life comics, I guess). A little demonstration is in order.

Here’s a trick question: what kind of being lives on planet Octo? Duh: Octo-men! The following Flip Falcon story, illustrated by Don Rico (and not “Orville Wells”, despite claims to the contrary), was printed in Fantastic Comics no. 17 (April 1941).

Fantastic Comics #17

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Interesting that “dog” is used as a slur even on planet Octo, despite there clearly being no canines around.
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Nasty little brutes, aren’t they?

The Super-Tests of the Super-Pets! (scripted by Edmond Hamilton, penciled by John Forte and inked by Sheldon Moldoff) is every bit as goofy as it sounds. I actually enjoyed reading it, much to my own amazement. Anyway, while Proty II (Chameleon Boy’s pet) transforms into quite a few creatures to pass the super-test, he clearly favours tentacular forms (and who could blame him?) This was published in Adventure Comics no. 322 (July 1964).

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How is it worse to be a jellyfish instead of some sort of blobby ectoplasm thing?

Speaking of Proty II and ectoplasm, a dozen issues later, the Legion decides to visit his home planet, which is just full of these jello-marshmallow doughboys, Protean citizens all. Part I: The Unknown Legionnaire and Part II: The Secret of Unknown Boy! (both parts scripted by Edmond Hamilton, penciled by John Forte and inked by Sheldon Moldoff) were published in Adventure Comics no. 334 (July 1965).

Adventure Comics no. 334
To terrify Proteans, whose appendages are borderline tentacles, Saturn Girl decides to conjure up a… monster with tentacles.
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In case you didn’t believe me that Proteans have “tentacles”.
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The shape-shifting Proteans turn into more streamlined versions of themselves, with more pronounced tentacles. I swear, everyone is obsessed.

Next, I’d like to regale you with a fight scene illustrated by Murphy Anderson (yum!): Scourge of the Human Race!, scripted by Gardner Fox and published in Hawkman no. 15 (August-September 1966).

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Isn’t it a lovely last panel?

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If I Can’t Be Clark Kent… Nobody Can!, published in Action Comics no. 524 (October 1981), scripted by Martin Pasko, penciled by Curt Swan and inked by Frank Chiaramonte, offers us a nice helping of tentacles.

Action Comics #524 (1981)

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If I should see an octopus
Lift its arms out of the sea
Or see its shadow rising up
Cross the rooftops above the streets
I’d follow those dancing limbs
To the spinning edge of the sky
Where all the boats fall off the world
Into the octopus’s eye

~ ds